15 Dec 2004 |
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| One of the great things about the internet as far as news publishing goes is that instead of waiting for the next day to hear about the latest news, you can find out about what’s happening now by simply visiting a news website. This reflects the natural order of things - news doesn’t just wait for 6am the next day to happen at once, but happens continuously over the day. Of course, the traditional model of news publishing in discrete daily packages via the print media was the best model for publishing up-to-date news until the advent of the internet. The problem is that while time flows past at the rate of the always constant rate of 24 hours every day, the flow of news events is more uneven. It’s a bit like the joke about London buses - you wait for ages for one to turn up, and then 3 come at once. The problem is then how to fill those newspaper pages in ‘lean’ times. And this is what has caused the increasing presence of what I’ll call pseudonews for the purpose of this article. A pseudonews article fulfils the clinical description of news in so far as it tells you about something that you previously didn’t know about, but that has just recently occurred. The problem with pseudonews articles is that they don’t fulfil my (admittedly subjective) criteria for what deserves to be published in a national (or even regional) newspaper. A real news article should tell you about people, events or ideas that: * are significantly beyond the usual; * are likely to affect the you in a significant manner in the medium to long term; * enable you to predict the future with a reasonable degree of certainity. Here are a few examples of headlines to pseudonews items: * [Member of House of Representatives] blames economic woes on World Bank, IMF * No Alternative to Democracy - [ex-Senator] * PDP, ANPP Crises Linked to Third Term Ambition - [Church Leader] * Bank Consolidation, A Laudable Initiative - [Entertainment Promoter] * [State Government] plans to spend N400m to complete trade fair complex I’ll come round to giving tips for distinguishing real news articles from pseudonews in a moment - it’s a skill I’ve had to learn, because the alternative is to waste time with the sheer volume of pseudonews and miss out the real news items. But first - why pseudonews? Well, the reality is that it is expensive to gather real news, both in terms of time and money. It involves a lot of travel, research and investigation - and newspapers do not have endless budgets. Pseudonews offers a cheap alternative for filling the pages of each daily newspaper edition. A journalist doesn’t have to worry about the budget for getting a news story running out unexpectedly (as might happen while investigating an unusually tangled news story), since the coverage of pseudonews usually involves no more than a trip to a press conference where someone delivers the news story. In fact, because the vast majority of pseudonews stories are usually about some person saying something of supposed importance, the story can be gathered simply by speaking to that person on the phone. Another factor driving the rise of pseudonews is that Nigerians simply feel that they must comment on every news item that hits the headlines, whether or not it is beyond their area of expertise. Of course, the more powerful the Nigerian, the more likely his view is to be aired in the media. It may well satisfy his ego, but it doesn’t do much good for anyone else. I’m not going to criticise media houses for publishing pseudonews - it obviously makes good economic sense to keep publishing these stories, else the media houses would have folded by now. I daresay there are people who actually enjoy reading such stories. However, for those people who are short of time and don’t have all day to read every single article published by Nigerian newspapers, here are a few tips on separating the wheat from the chaff: 1. If the story is about a person saying something, find out who exactly is speaking. If he is someone who is in a position to actually do something about the matter he is talking about so that he significantly affects the lives of many Nigerians, then pay attention. The kind of people I would put in this category (in no particular order of importance) are: * The President/Vice President; * Leaders in the ruling party; * Leaders in the legislature; * Heads of certain ministries (e.g. finance, petroleum, power and steel); * Heads of certain government agencies and organisations (e.g. CBN, NEPA, EFCC, NAFDAC); * Heads of military and quasi-military organisations; * State governors (when they are talking about matters relating to their states, and matters relating to their party selection processes); * Captains of industry; * Anyone who is stupendously wealthy (since money approximates to power in Nigeria); * Leaders of labour unions; * Leaders of local militia; * The World Bank/IMF; * Western governments; * Foreign investors. Anything said or done by anyone else is probably pseudonews, unless it is significantly unusual enough to merit attention (e.g. ‘Fawehinmi Declares Undying Support For Obasanjo’ is real news). In fact, if a story is unusual, that is enough to exclude it from being classified as pseudonews. 2. Again, if the story is about a person saying something, then pay attention to what they are saying. * If you see phrases in the story that indicate a future action is intended (like ‘planning to do’, ‘looking into ways of doing’ or ‘proposing to do’), then it’s probably pseudonews, unless the speaker or the organisation he represents has strong personal or financial reasons for doing what they are planning to do. * If the story is about someone who is ‘decrying’, ‘bemoaning’, ‘chiding’, ‘tasking’, ‘blaming’, ‘advising’, ‘faulting’, or ‘lauding’, then it’s probably pseudonews. 3. Even if the story is about someone influential doing something, pay attention to what he is doing. If it is something unremarkable that is meant as a gesture with no significant long term effect (like ‘State Governor Donates 30 Motorcycles To Commercial Motorcyclists’), then it is pseudonews. On the other hand, if it is significantly out of the ordinary (e.g. ‘Obasanjo Wears Purple Business Suit To Public Function’) or likely to have a significant impact for the future (‘Soludo Announces Dollarisation Of Economy’) then it is real news. So I’ll wrap up this article here, and hope that in some way I’ve saved 4 months of your life that would otherwise have been spent digesting the views of a retired major-general on refinery privatisation. Happy newspaper reading! PS - Since the last time I published an article here, it seems the legislature has finally got its act together and passed the Power Sector Reform Bill. I'd like to think that it was because of this article, but I think I'd be giving myself too much credit!
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